William Lawton
Mr. William Lawton is Executive Chairman of Seagate Global Resources. He started his career in finance as an International Banking Officer at Sumitomo Bank where he was responsible for trade finance throughout the Asia Pacific region. Lawton founded the Seagate Global Group in 1996 to focus on socially responsible investments in the Asia-Pacific region. Lawton helped modernize China’s central bank and established China Everbright as one of China’s pre-eminent asset management companies, taking a number of companies public in the green energy space. He pioneered Smart Loans in 2015 which are low risk/high return alternative fixed income instruments in socially responsible strategies such as recycling. Lawton has a 30-year history as a professional investor and helped set up and manage six institutional investment operations at global financial entities. Lawton holds a BA degree in economics from UC Berkeley, an MA in International Economics from Middlebury Institute and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. Mr. Lawton was Adjunct Professor of Finance at Tsinghua University.
Sam Shang
Mr. Sam Shang is President of Seagate Global Resources. Mr. Shang has been a Seagate Partner since 2010 in charge of China focused trade finance. He co-founded Harbor Green Recycling in 2014 which was acquired by Seagate Global Resources. Mr. Shang was formerly President of Yunnan Trading Company, the government trading entity for the Province of Yunnan, China which is the size of California and has 47 mm people. He has managed the import and export of billions of dollars of goods and commodities throughout the Asia Pacific region over 30 years, including recycled materials. Mr. Shang is expert in all aspects of import/export, logistics, trade finance, and recycled paper materials. Mr. Shang maintains excellent relations with a number of large Chinese state-owned enterprises and financing entities.